“I would like to, but I have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to Chicago.”
“What for?”
“Business.”
“We had a wonderful evening, but when I went to bed, I was somewhat apprehensive. You know how you have to guard against Sam’s flights?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever goes up must come down and I was ten miles high.”
“I know.”
“But I was on guard and I did not fall. I went straight to bed and to sleep. Then some hours later I awoke suddenly. There was nothing wrong. I was wide awake and completely alert. I thought about your proposal and it seemed to me that it might be possible after all. If only I did not ruin everything.”
Mercer passes a dish of sweet potatoes. At each place he stops breathing, head thrown back and eyes popping out, then lets out his breath with a strangling sound.
Uncle Oscar has hiked an arm back over his chair and says something to Sam. I can’t make it out but I recognize the voice, the easy garrulity wheezing off into a laughter which solicits your agreement and threatens reprisal if you withhold it. Yet I used to like Uncle Oscar’s store in Feliciana — to hear his voice now is almost to smell the floorboards soured by wet Growena. But even then, to be there and to be solicited by him was a perilous thing. It was a perilous thing to see him do battle in the deadly arena of a country store, see him gird himself to annihilate his opponent and, to insure himself against counterattack, go wheezing off into easy laughter and so claim the victory.
“Oscar!” cries Aunt Edna, pretending to be in a buzzing good humor. Already she can hear Sam in Dallas: “I heard a delightful commentary on the mind of the South last week—” Leaning over, she gives Uncle Oscar a furious affectionate pat which signifies that he is a good fellow and we all love him. It also signifies that he can shut up.
“There was no question of sleep,” says Kate. “I came downstairs and found one of Father’s mysteries and went back to bed and read the whole thing. It was about some people in Los Angeles. The house was dark and still and once in a while a boat whistle blew on the river. I saw how my life could be — living as a neat little person like Delia Street, doing my stockings every night. But then I remembered what happened in Memphis. Did you know I lived in Memphis once?”
My aunt pays as little attention to Uncle Oscar as to Sam. Her thumbnail methodically combs the grooves which represent the lion’s mane.
“It was in 1951—you were in the army. Father and I were warring over politics. Come to think of it, I might actually have been kicked out of the house. Anyhow Mother suggested it might be a good thing if I went to visit an old classmate of hers in Memphis, a lady named Mrs Boykin Lamar. She was really quite a person, had sung in the Civic Opera in New York and wrote quite a funny book about her travels in Europe as a girl. They were as kind to me as anyone could be. But no one could think of anything to say. Night after night we sat there playing operas on the phonograph and dreading the moment when the end came and someone had to say something. I became so nervous that one night I slipped on the hearth and fell into the fire. Can you believe it was a relief to suffer extreme physical pain? Hell couldn’t be fire — there are worse things than fire. I moved to a hotel and for a while I was all right. I had a job doing case work and I had plenty of dates. But after a while the room began to reproach me. When I came home from work every afternoon, the sun would be setting across the river in Arkansas and every day the yellow light became sadder and sadder. And Arkansas over there in the yellow West — O my God, you have no idea how sad it looked. One afternoon I packed my suitcase and caught the Illinois Central for home.”
Sam is spieling in pretty good style, all the while ironing out the tablecloth into shallow gutters with the blade of his knife. A new prefatory note creeps into his voice. It is like a symphony when the “good” part is coming, and I know that Sam is working up to one of his stories. These stories of Sam used to arouse in me an appreciation so keen and pleasurable that it bordered on the irritable. On the dark porch in Feliciana he told us once of the time when he made a journey up the headwaters of the Orinoco and caught a fever and lay ill for weeks. One night he heard an incredibly beautiful voice sing the whole of Winterreise. He was sure it was delirium until the next morning when he met the singer, an Austrian engineer who sang lieder better than Lotte Lehmann, etc. When he finished I was practically beside myself with irritable pleasure and became angry with the others because they were not sufficiently moved by the experience.
“Emily, do you remember the night we saw There Shall Be No Night and you were so moved that you insisted on walking all the way back to the Carlyle?”
But Kate pays no attention. She holds her feathered thumb to the light and inspects it minutely. “Last night everything was fine until I finished the book. Then it became a matter of waiting. What next, I thought. I began to get a little scared — for the first time I had the feeling of coming to the end of my rope. I became aware of my own breathing. Things began to slip a little. I fixed myself a little drink and took two nembutals and waited for the lift.”
It is the first time she has spoken of her capsules. My simplemindedness serves her well.
“You know what happened then? What did Sam say? Never mind. Did you see Merle? No? Hm. What happened was the most trivial thing imaginable, nothing grand at all, though I would like to think it was. I took six or eight capsules altogether. I knew that wouldn’t kill me. My Lord, I didn’t want to die — not at that moment. I only wanted to — break out, or off, off dead center — Listen. Isn’t it true that the only happy men are wounded men? Admit it! Isn’t that the truth?” She breaks off and goes off into a fit of yawning. “I felt so queer. Everything seemed so — no ’count somehow, you know?” She swings her foot and hums a little tune. “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember too well. How strange. I’ve always remembered every little thing.”
“—and you spoke to me for the first time of your messianic hopes?” Sam smiles at my aunt. In Feliciana we used to speculate on the new messiah, the scientist-philosopher-mystic who would come striding through the ruins with the Gita in one hand and a Geiger counter in the other. But today Sam miscalculates. My aunt says nothing. The thumbnail goes on combing the lion’s mane.
Dinner over, Uncle Oscar waits in the dining room until the others have left, then seizes his scrotum and gives his leg a good shake.
I rise unsteadily, sleepy all at once to the point of drunkenness.
“Wait.” Kate takes my arm urgently in both hands. “I am going with you.”
“All right. But first I think I’ll take a little nap on the porch.”
“I mean to Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
“Yes. Do you mind if I go?”
“No.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Could you change it to tonight and get two tickets on the train?”
“Why the train?” I begin to realize how little I have slept during the past week.
“I’ll tell you what. You go lie down and I’ll take care of it.”
“All right.”
“After Chicago do you think there is a possibility we might take a trip out west and stay for a while in some little town like Modesto or Fresno?”
“It is possible.”
“I’ll fix everything.” She sounds very happy. “Do you have any money?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.”
It is a matter for astonishment, I think drowsily in the hammock, that Kate should act with such dispatch — out she came, heels popping, arm in arm with her stepmother, snapped her purse and with Sam looking on, somewhat gloomily it struck me, off she went in her stiff little Plymouth — and then I think why. It is trains. When it comes to a trip, to the plain business of going, just stepping up into the Pullman and gliding out of town of an evening, she is as swift and remorseless as Delia Street.